the same features, the same hair, the same moustache, the same neck-tie.

If it is necessary to go further and look for more links, they exist.' About 1884, in his studio in the rue des Beaux-Arts, Fantin-Latour and a group of friends conducted experiments in photography using artificial light. One of them was most enthusiastic about everything concerning photography, he `tried to take us in the evening by magnesium flash and only succeeded, most times, in getting pictures where almost everyone had abruptly shut their eyes'. Those evenings at Fantin's coincided with the execution of his painting Autour du piano (Salon of 1885), in which at least two of these friends appear. The kind of lighting reproduced in the painting corresponds very closely to the strong tonal contrasts to be found in portrait photographs taken by magnesium light, and its overall appearance may be said to be photographic (27). Reviewing the Salon of 1885, the journal amusant described it The audience are grouped around a piano. Intimate scene. Very powerful interpretation of nature. But one flaw: they all appear fixed in that pose caused by the ` hold it a second' command of the photographer. It is not known when Fantin first interested himself in photography, but his earlier portraits - the self-portrait 0f 1858, the Hommage d Delacroix (c. 1864), the Atelier aux Batignolles (c. 1 870) - are all strongly photographic in character. Fantin's portrait of Manet, painted in 1867, might easily be taken for a photograph (28) ; his late portrait entitled Sonia (18go) is hardly distinguishable from one. There can be little doubt that Fantin owed something to the camera. In both his portraits and studies of still-life he - scrupulously eschews all obvious personal or conventional manipulation of the paint, as though to emulate the anonymous surface uniformity of the photograph. Similarly his colour is frequently modulated within a narrow range of grey tonalities. 17

26 (pelota). Dan inirr: Don (yixote t. 1 860. (()il on panv1, grisaille)

and Sanrho Panza.

27 (bottom). Fantin-Latour: Autour du piano. 1 884 28 (right). Fantin-Latour: Portrait

of douard Manet. 1867

MANET
To what extent the sharp tonal style in Manet's painting can be attributed to photography is a matter for speculation. There were, of course, other sources too from which the artist may have drawn some inspiration, corroborating at least what was already a stylistic propensity in his work. The most obvious one is in seventeenth-century Spanish painting; interest in that period was much revived by the middle of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire's comparison of his relation to Poe with Manet's to Goya does not exclude the possibility that he got something from Poe and Manet from Goya, even though their initial attractions to those figures depended on ideas already germinating in the minds and works of both poet and painter.

64

Manet's teacher, Thomas Couture, employed the same tonal juxtapositions as his pupil, and Japanese prints with their flat areas of colour, solid blacks and complete absence of tonal modelling, may also have conditioned Manet's style. One will probably never know what exactly produced the initial impulse towards this characteristic in Manet's work but photography's role must be of some significance. It has been mentioned that photographs by artificial light were not the only ones in which such a tonal characteristic appeared. Many of those taken in strong sunlight with ordinary plates, before the development of ortho- or panchromatic emulsions especially, also contained this feature. Several of Talbot's early views of outdoor subjects are good cases in point, and similar examples in France are easily found. Manet, without doubt, knew of such photographs, and of Nadar's experiments with artificial light. By about 86o he was acquainted with artists who used photographs. One of Manet's etched portraits of Baudelaire was made from a Nadar photograph of the writer taken by artificial light in 1859 (29, 30). Here, Manet intensified the already considerable dark and light contrasts of the photograph, with little attempt to model the structural

` plaster heads', because the highlights in the face and hands appeared as brilliant as the shirts and cuffs. Manet is known to have used photographs on other occasions. His portrait etching of Edgar Allan Poe was done from an American daguerreotype. It was probably intended to illustrate Baudelaire's translation of the Histoires extraordinaires d'Edgar Poe, first published in 1856. Manet's note to Isabelle Lemonnier in 188o asking for her photographs so that ` I can catch you more surely when I want to do a sketch' suggests that some of his water-colour portraits of her, executed that summer, were made directly from photographs. The tonal characteristics of his portraits at the time, in his small painting of the actress Jeanne de Marsy entitled Spring (1881), for example, and in the pastels of Mme Jules Guillemet made that same year, are photographic in essence. There, the characteristics of the non-panchromatic emulsion occur. Lady Eastlake's juxtaposition of such photographs with the paintings of the `Spanish school' was made with good reason. In Manet's portraits, too, the darkest and lightest areas predominate and within them only the slightest modulations of tone are perceptible. In the brightest parts cspe31. Manel : Portrait o.1 . ilirv Laurent. 1 982 ( pastel)

29. Nadar: Portrait of Charles Baudelaire. 1 859

30. Mane1: Portrait o/ Charles Baudelaire. 1 865 (etching)

forms still visible in the shadowed side of the head in the photograph. Contemporary artists, it has been said, called Nadar's artificially lighted portraits

cially, the physiognomic structures are only implied by notations of delicate, evanescent tints high up in the tonal scale. This peripheral means of suggesting the solidity of forms is a common feature in portrait photographs for which no special lighting effects were employed to render the volumes of the face more comprehensible. It is clearly apparent, for example, in photographic portraits taken of Manet and his friends. By utilizing this peculiarity intrinsic in the photograph, by eliminating the whole range of middle tones, thus tending to flatten the forms, a very effective pictorial reconciliation could be brought about between the subtly articulated photographic image and the planar patterns of Japanese prints. Manet's portraits of Wry Laurent, executed in 1881 and 1882, convey the same tonality (31) and it is not surprising to learn that Miry Laurent accoude was made directly from a photograph, the picture in turn used as a sketch for the portrait which appears in the background, left, of the large painting in the Courtauld Institute Collection, the Bar aux Folies-Bergre of 1881-2.18
THE EXECUTION OF THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN

Thodore Duret, Manet's friend and one of his earliest biographers, writing of the artist's series of paintings, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, stated that the head of Maximilian alone had been painted in a conventional manner after a photograph. Duret was referring, principally no doubt, to the large finished canvas in the Mannheim Museum (32). It can be shown, however, that Manet used several photographs, in addition to relying on news dispatches from Mexico, to authenticate these paintings. Probably the first version, now in the Boston Museum, was made before the artist could lay his hands on exactly relevant material, though it clearly relates to the first, somewhat obscure, information telegraphed to Europe in July 1867, weeks after the execution had actually taken place. The first news of Maximilian's capture on 15 May 1867 arrived soon after that date, but it is unlikely that Manet even considered this as a theme for painting until late in June when it became known to a shocked and disbelieving Europe that the Emperor had been sentenced to death - that news reaching the Continent after he had already been executed. It is difficult to know to what extent Manet, a Republican sympathizer who had good cause for grievance against Louis Napoleon, conceived of these paintings as a criticism of the regime and its cowardly part in the Maximilian affair. Like his earlier painting the Battle between the Kearsage and Alabama it may have been intended principally as a straightforward history painting of an important contemporary event. In either case photographs would have been very relevant documentary material and in using them Manet was acting in accordance with the tradition of

llanet: The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. 1867(?)

reportage in modern painting in which literal accuracy, exacerbated by the camera, had become imperative. In i g i o the painter Max Liebermann, coming across an album of photographs in Hamburg connected with Maximilian's tragic death in Mexico and remembering what Duret had written, was struck by their apparent relationship to Manet's paintings. Among the Hamburg photographs were the portraits of Maximilian and those of Generals Miramon and Mejia, all of whom had been executed at the same time. They show clearly that not only was Maximilian's head based on a photograph (33, 34); but that the representation of Miramon too (at the Emperor's left) corresponded to a photographic likeness (35, 36). The third figure of the condemned group, that of General Mejia, who is painted with his head thrown back, having just received the fatal volley, also resembles the photograph reproduced by Liebermann in the peculiar structure of the nose, and the shape of the head (37, 38). Photographs of Mejia were just as available in Paris as those of Miramon, but in foreshortening the head Manet may have been forced to distort the features; the darker complexion certainly corresponds to the general knowledge that Mejia was an Indian. There is one other likeness in the Mannheim painting: that of the sergeant on the extreme right, preparing to deliver the coup de grace. Undoubtedly, it is that of General Porfirio Diaz. It is unlikely that he was present at the execution

35 (below). Photograph of General Miramon 36 (right). Manet: The Execution o/ the Emperor Maximilian. 1 8t7(') (detail)

33 (above). Photograph of the Emperor Maximilian 34 (right). Mane(: The Execution 1J the Emperor Maximilian. t 8(7(?) (detail)

37 (above). Photograph of General Nleiia 38 (right). Manet: The Execution n/ the Emperor Maximilian. 1867 ('y (detail)

in Queretaro which took place on t g June, for during the following two days he led Juarez's Republican troops in the capture of Mexico City from the Imperial government. The structure of the head and face, the hair swept forward, the type of beard and moustache are the same features to be found in a photograph of Diaz also contained in the Hamburg album (3g, o). Why Manet included him in his paintings is unknown. Perhaps it was a reference to

official report from Mexico in August that year stated that the executioners for each of the condemned men numbered four, with one in reserve. But because of the clumsy misfiring and wounding of Maximilian in the first fusillade, it was said that a sixth and possibly seventh soldier attempted to complete the deed. In number, Manet's executioners follow the photograph rather than the Press report. In the Mannheim painting there are also one officer and seven

39. Photograph of General Diaz

o. Manet:

The Execution of the

t. Photograph of the firing squad in the execution of A9 aximilian. 1 g June

1 867

Emperor Maximilian. 1867(?)

( detail)

Diaz's refusal to come to terms with Maximilian when offers were made earlier in the campaign. Perhaps, considering the rather pensive expression of the figure in the paintings, the artist meant to convey the regret of the famous general when he learned of the execution; a story to that effect was circulated soon afterwards. Diaz's portrait may also have been included to represent the opposition army simply because he was the best known and most popular of all the Republican generals and very likely his photographs were easily available in Paris. A view of the cemetery showing a great stone wall where Maximilian and his generals were shot (near a high wall according to a trustworthy contemporary report) is included among the Hamburg photographs. But the most important photograph contained in the Hamburg collection, and particularly relevant in the problem of dating Manet's paintings, is that of one of the firing squads (one officer and seven men) which carried out the sentence (t). A more or less

men - if the top of the kipi shown between the third and fourth figures from the right of the composition, and the curious line occurring between the legs of the third figure from the right can be counted as indications of another soldier. In fact, the small Copenhagen painting as well as the lithograph made of the subject each contain a total of eight figures for the executioners. Photographs of Maximilian and others involved in the Mexican campaign were not difficult to find in Paris before the Queretaro incident. Carte portraits had been taken of Maximilian earlier in the i 86os by Mayer and Pierson, by Mulnier, by Bingham (after 1862) and by others. Furthermore, the A. Libert Company in Paris (13 boulevard des Capucines), specialists in American photographs, certainly distributed portraits of the belligerents from 1 862, when active hostilities began against the forces of Juarez, though Maximilian did not accept the Mexican throne until 1864. Other portraits were taken in Mexico by the photographers Merille, Aubert and Valleto, and with little doubt were

sold on the European market in the 1 86os before the execution. Immediately after the news of the execution the demand for such photographs must have increased. It may have been at this time that a photographer named Ducacq, or Desacq, sold, in Paris, carte-sized photo-montages of Maximilian, Miramon, Mejia and another unidentified military figure, possibly either Castillo or Avellano, two ranking officers in Maximilian's command. Manet would not have had far to look for photographic likenesses of those present at the execution once their identities were known. By mid July, three. or four weeks after the so-called `drama of Queretaro', photographs of the firing squad along with others could have reached Paris, supplying a morbid iconography of the event (42). They would therefore coincide with the first comprehensive and less contradictory reports published in the popular Press. It could not have been much before that time that Manet began to paint the subject. The date, 1 9 June 1867, in the lower left corner of the Mannheim picture is of course the actual date of the execution and not that of the completion of the canvas. It was not, however, until August and even as late as October that the most trustworthy sources of information elaborately spelled out the gruesome details concerning the dispositions of the troops and their victims, the clothing worn by Maximilian and his generals, the number of witnesses and all the other macabre minutiae of the situation. It was probably

not until mid August, for example, that it became known in France that Maximilian had actually worn a large sombrero in his last moments - a feature followed by Manet in all his versions of the subject. It was not until October, it seems, that information clearly stated that the condemned men, with Miramon in the middle, were separated by three paces and that the three firing squads were about sixteen feet from them - which Manet ignored. However, earlier reports in July and August noted that Maximilian was in the middle, the three men holding hands, that Miramon and Mejia were forced to remove the blouses of their uniforms and that the `shooting parties' were ` within a few paces of the prisoners' - just as they appear in Manet's canvases. An astounding photograph apparently taken the moment before the order to fire was given was probably sold in France during the latter part of 1867. Though in some respects it corresponds with the later, more sober descriptions in the Press, in other ways it contradicts them. Very likely, it was a composite photograph manufactured to meet an obvious demand for a record of that fatal moment (43). Crowds of onlookers are awkwardly placed in the foreground behind the ring of soldiers surrounding the scene, despite reports from Mexico which clearly indicated that the population of Queretaro were prohibited from accompanying the cortge to the Cerro de las Campanas, the hill on the outskirts of the town where the execution took place. In the distance stand

42. Disderi(?) : Composite rarle photograph relating to the execution of Maximilian. Probably 1867

, 43 Carde photograph (cotrtposit, ?) showing the execution of Maximilian, Miramon and Alelia, tr) June 1867. 11 . d.

Maximilian, Miramon and Mejia, facing three firing squads who aim their muskets. Manet's arrangement of the scene has nothing in common with this photograph nor, considering his stylistic propensities, would it have been feasible pictorially for him to follow such an undramatic composition. His is much closer to Goya's painting of 1814, The Third of May r8o8. Whether Manet intended exhibiting one of the Maximilian canvases in his private show near the Pont de l'Alma that year to coincide with the large Exposition Universelle is open to question. In any case, it is unlikely that his ultimate version of the event would have been finished in time to make a showing possible before both his own and the Paris exhibition closed at the end of October. Furthermore, there is still some ambiguity concerning the official suppression of his paintings. It is certain that an interdiction was placed on his lithograph of the subject which may well have deterred him from exhibiting one of the canvases, if indeed there was still time to do so. The distribution in France of photographs relating directly to the execution seems also to have been prohibited and it is said that Disderi was sentenced to one month in prison for circulating photographs of the clothes in which Maximilian was shot. It has been suggested that the uniforms of Manet's executioners were those of the French army at the time and thus symbolized the perfidious complicity of Louis Napoleon and his Ministers in deserting their puppet Emperor in Mexico. But as the Hamburg photograph of the firing squad shows, in comparison with the illustrations in the 1866 publication, Album photographique des uniformes de l'arme franfaise (44), the short-bloused uniforms in Manet's paint44. Photo-painting from Album photographique des uniformes de l'arme franaise. 1 866

ings are more like those of the Mexicans than of the French; the Mexicans too wore kpis, the French military head-dress. Despite the fact that the artist's friend, the Commandant Hippolyte Lejosne, provided a squad of soldiers from the Ppinire Barracks near the Care Saint-Lazare to act as models, Manet's soldiers in number and uniform are undoubtedly based on the Mexican photograph, but their appearance is somewhat altered by the inclusion of white gaiters which, as part of the French uniform, might have been used to point up the incrimination. Still, it is doubtful that the prime consideration was given to their pictorial relevance as also has been said of the improbable proximity of the troops to the victims. It follows, then, that Manet had access to more than the one photograph mentioned by Duret, and that whatever symbolic or purely pictorial meanings his pictures were meant to convey, they were to a significant degree accurate documents of a tragic event. 1 a WORK FOR ARTISTS Notwithstanding the contention that ultimately a painting was superior to a photograph, for economic reasons alone it was inevitable that in the taking of likenesses the lens would supersede the brush. Once portrait painters could earn a living, but photography has ruined this, complained a dejected artist in 86o to Arsne Houssaye, editor of L'Artiste, the painter having therefore become a photographer instead. `One knows that photography has harmed painting considerably, and has killed portraiture especially, once the gagne-pain of the artist,' commented the painter-photographer Henri Lc Secq in 1863. Like the miniaturists, many artists now had to retouch portrait photographs for a living. In this way the painter James Smetham was said to have been victimized by photography. Early in his career [we are told], he had depended chiefly on portraits for the certain part of his income, which was pretty well assured and satisfactory. But this source was cut off to him, as to many others, by the invention of photography. The placebo offered to displaced portrait painters by Ford Madox Brown in 1868, though vaguely describing some stylistic escape-hatch, is nevertheless an indication of the general feeling that in portraiture something different had to be done. Photography has taken the place of portraiture [he said], but a revival must ere long take place. Photography is but the assistant (saving the artist and sitter time) of portrait painting, which can never exist but by the effort and will of genius. The professed portrait painter, now becoming extinct, would be enabled to return from photography to a more simple and artistic style of picture than hitherto in vogue,

7. Impressionism

THE CLANDESTINE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY The young Impressionist painters appeared in Paris in the early i86os in the thick of the battle between photography and art. It is hardly possible that they were not affected by it. They were on one hand the progeny of a long tradition of naturalism culminating in an absolutist conception of realism; on the other they were heirs to a legacy of cynicism towards all imitative art. Both attitudes were undoubtedly germinated and exacerbated by the existence of photography. The apparent dichotomy in Impressionism, the concern with both imitation and expression, the attempt to reconcile truth with poetry was by no means new in art. But in the context of the struggle between art and photography this dualism was likely to be exaggerated and, at some point, to undergo a qualitative change. Baudelaire's warning that photography and poetry were irreconcilable is pertinent here and, because of this conviction, he not only anticipated but helped nurture the essential concepts on which Post-Impressionist styles were formed. The paucity of references to photography in the notes and letters of the Impressionists is no guarantee that they did not use it. Indeed, the silence may be entirely relevant considering the growth of photography as an art and the commensurate antipathy artists felt for it. Artists found it expedient to hide the fact of their use of photographic material or its influence upon them. Only one of Delacroix's status and literary propensities would be likely to express candidly and in detail his opinions on the subject, and to confirm his use of photographs. But, by implication at least, critics in France and in England demonstrated that there was an obvious correlation between the use artists made of photographs and their reluctance to admit it. How many painters exhibiting in the 1861 Salon would dare to confirm Gautier's observations without the fear of losing face? I do not propose I declared , Joseph Pennell when asked later to comment on the use artists made of photographs, to give away the tricks of the trade. By refraining I have no doubt I shall receive the silent blessings of the multitude of duffers among whom I find myself. Artists did not publicize their use of photographs, it was said, because `they have a notion . . . that they would lose caste with the picture-purchasing

public'. Sickert's view on this question, in the words of a music-hall ditty, was 46 that `some does it hopenly, and some on the sly'. THE IMPRESSIONISTS' USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY In these circumstances it is difficult to know the exact extent to which the Impressionists made straightforward use of the camera image, though certainly its oblique influence is detectable. Admittedly sparse, and not always of immaculate provenance, there are nevertheless certain examples which show that these artists sometimes utilized photographs directly. The uncompromising naturalism to which they aspired - Monet in particular, and particularly in the earlier years - their dedication to painting only before nature; the great emphasis on the objective eye; their desire to record the transitory character of natural light and shade, amounted to a kind of perceptual extremism which was germane to photography itself, and would not necessitate - indeed would obviate - copying from photographic prints. But by the same token it is most likely that in their own interests they would scrutinize the work of contemporary photographers. 47 THEODORE ROBINSON Certainly other artists who associated themselves with the idea of Impressionism did not scruple to use photographs. For example, Theodore Robinson, called the first American Impressionist, frequently employed them as a mature artist while painting in France from 1887 until 1892. Robinson was not a pupil of Monet as is sometimes believed; he knew Monet as a close associate, if not an intimate friend, in those five years when both artists were working in Giverny. There, according to Robinson's biographer, John Baur, many evenings were spent together discussing art and it is hardly likely that Robinson's partiality for the photographic aide-mimoire was not communicated and his photographs (several of which survive) not shown to Monet. Some of the entries in Robinson's diaries are extremely pertinent. It was right for a `realist', he wrote, to utilize the impartial vision of the camera: `Painting direct from nature is difficult, as things do not remain the same. The camera helps to retain the picture in your mind.' Furthermore, `a photo would have saved me time as I would have made fewer changes,' but, ` I must be~.vare of the photo, get what I can out of it and then go on.' In defence of the artist Baur suggests that he was not so much a slave to photography as his diaries would lead one to believe: his pure landscapes were painted directly from nature as often were his figurative works. Robinson did get what he could from photographs and `then go on', but in some ways he was quite dependent on them, if the examples reproduced by Baur can be thought of as typical. As a number of Robinson's paintings and the

photographs on which they were based survive, it is worth examining them in detail. In the absence of similar comparisons in the work of the other Impressionists, one may here discover certain things applicable to Impressionist painting generally in relation to photographic images. Not unlike other landscape views at that time, Robinson's photographs are characterized by the intense contrasts of dark and light areas, the general suppression of middle tones and the consequent loss or diffusion of details in the flat patches of dark and light. In them are found the effects of the nonpanchromatic emulsion, of halation and of blurring through movement: those aberrations of tone and form frequently found in nineteenth-century landscape photographs which were so strongly abjured by Ruskin and other critics. Here, as in the photographs taken of Corot, the foliated areas are reduced to shimmering masses of ambiguous form, identifiable only by the general contexts and by the clues provided in a few legible botanical objects appearing in sharper focus mostly in the foregrounds. In Robinson's paintings, as in those of the French Impressionists, these features are not only conveyed in the manner of the photographs, but are grossly exaggerated. Even the clearly recognizable forms in the foregrounds of the photographs, which traditionally artists had carefully described so that their meanings could be implied in the more schematic ones further in depth, are suppressed. Robinson makes everything in the picture subservient to a single, highly articulated and uniform handling, irrespective of either the individual structures of objects or their textural characteristics - as though the scene was viewed from its reflection on the agitated surface of a river. In his canvas, Two in a Boat (1881), no careful distinction is made between the water in the foreground and that in the back and the brushwork is the same for water, boats and figures (103). In The Layette of 1892 there is, similarly, one homogeneous and scintillating surface (56). In that respect Robinson did exceed the photographs, expressing the same palpable, painterly quality generic in the work of all the other landscape Impressionists. By another kind of comparison between Robinson's paintings and his photographs, one discovers the more objective and rational'side of Impressionism. To give his paintings the structure which could support the abstract brushwork, Robinson might well have felt obliged to render certain forms in his pictures with a great degree of photographic truthfulness. Sometimes, even, some of the details which were obliterated in the photographs, those in the figures especially, were restored in the paintings (55). Accuracy in the proportions of objects, and in their relative scale, seems to have been imperative for him, just as it was for other Impressionist painters. His care in transferring their dimensions from the photograph to the canvas, which was sometimes done by

1 6',

means of a grid, contrasts significantly with the fluid and subjective use of paint (10). This coexistence of the personal and the impersonal, at once contradictory and complementary, may well have been a way out of the dilemma posed by the intrusion of photography in naturalistic pictorial representation. 48

1 69

THE BLURRED IMAGE

As early as 182, fully two decades before Impressionism took root in France, alternatives were offered to the imagery of the photographic camera in a little-known yet significant article which appeared in the Spectator. The apparent inability of the new medium to reproduce natural colours or to record kinetic effects was seized upon as an example of the greater latitude open to painters and cited as a guarantee of their ultimate ascendancy over the lens. Not all the delicate truth of photographic delineation can supply the want of colour by imitating the local colour and atmospheric effect alone can landscape painters hope to stand against such a formidable rival as Nature. Therefore it behoves them to study with redoubled assiduity the influence of atmospheric light upon the individual hues of objects and the general tone of the scene; and also to strive to imitate the appearance of movement in figures and foliage, water and clouds. But the exasperating precocity of the photographic medium must often have made artists despair as it became clear that neither the representation of movement nor even the recording of natural colours was entirely beyond the power of that process. Photographers had always professed their desire to be able to arrest the motion of animated forms, to immobilize those images on the sensitized plate. The first photographs of urban scenes had an eerie, unnatural, sometimes surrealist quality about them. For though they were taken in full daylight, they were strangely depopulated, with no signs of life (1o5, 1o6). Only the inanimate objects in view were registered on the plates. In and out of the visual field of the lens passed the pedestrians and the horse-drawn vehicles. Here and there, only the most anonymous smears or ghostly vestiges faintly recorded some moving form or something that had suddenly moved off during the long exposure (107). Later, with faster emulsions and more efficient techniques, the populations of the cities appeared in the streets. Though they now took on more substance, their vestigial images becoming more apparent, they still remained more or less indefinable blurs spread out in the direction of movement. Among such images can be found the most incredible oddities of photographic truth: horses with two heads, legs without bodies, bodies without legs; men with multiple limbs and featureless faces, figures frozen in immobility

t og. Theodore Robinson: Two in a Boat. 1891.

i ii}.

l'Ixrtographic

study used for Robinson's Two in a Boat. c. t 8go

(below). Achille Quinet: The Pantheon, Parts. t 8fios(?) (photograph ) drtaill )

1 07

1 o8 (right). Monet: Bouleoard des Capucines. 1873

t o5and to6 detail;. Akchille Quinet: Virtrof Paris. r. t 86o i photograph

with their exact likenesses rising from them like preternatural wraiths. Like the human optical system the camera too has its own kind of persistence of vision; but unlike the eye it retains more. The eye is incapable of seeing more than the most immediate continuity patterns of moving objects; the camera can preserve the whole spectrum of animation. Blurred images of pedestrian forms moving at an ordinary rate of speed, such as were recorded by the sluggish mechanisms of early cameras, cannot be duplicated by the human vision. This feature common in photographs before the development of more sensitive plates and faster shutter systems, is one of the innovations attributable to Impressionist painting. The adumbration of pedestrian figures by a kind of blurred notat ; seems to be entirely new in art. It was the urban counterpart to the landscape represented by some of the Barbizon painters. Corot set the countryside in motion; Monet the city. At least one contemporary critic, Ernest Chesneau, recognized the visual significance of the blurred form. He described, in 18 74, Monet's painting of the boulevard des Capucines never has the amazing animation of the public thoroughfare, the ant-like swarming of the crowd on the pavement and the vehicles in the roadway, the movement of the trees in the dust and light along the boulevard; never has the elusive, the fleeting, the instantaneity of movement been caught in its incredible flux, and fixed, as it is i n this extraordinary ... Boulevard des Capucines (io8). It is unlikely that Chesneau, an avowed enemy of photography, would give that medium the distinction of being a possible source of Monet's imagery. And so far as is known, no other critic, however insulted or baffled by this painting, associated the blurred forms, even derogatorily, with the most obvious empirical evidence to hand: photographs, many of which even in the r 86os and 1 8 70s still contained these aberrations (i og). Louis Leroy, in his satirical dialogue on the

vim U

01i T'

t og (dell). Adolphe Braun: The Pools des Arts. 1 867 (detail from panoramic photograph of Paris l
t t o (above). Monet: Boulevard des Capucines. 1873 (detail)

first independent exhibition of the Impressionists, in which Monet's painting was shown, had a perplexed landscape painter call the blurred figures `black tongue-lickings' ('1ichettes noires'), pretending not to understand what they represented. He refused to accept these images partly because they had no basis in artistic tradition despite their existence in photographs. Despite the authoritative position commanded by photography, if it contradicted aesthetic conventions - as often it did from that time - it would not be used as a standard of measurement for pictorial truth. It was, in most cases, optical truth which was used as evidence against the excesses of Impressionism. They were facetiously called `the school of the eyes'. Who could see things the way they did? `Do I look like that when I walk along the boulevard des Capucines?' cried Leroy's annoyed painter. Corot too had been criticized about i 85o by a contemporary because of the manner in which he represented trees. No one ever sees them that way; `they are not trees, they are smoke'. Predominantly, both Corot and Monet represented their subjects, not as the eye would see them but as they might be recorded by the camera. As far as the photographic process was concerned, Monet's representations particularly were anachronisms. For despite the fact that such blurred images continued to appear in photographs long after the first so-called instantaneous photographs became popular about i 86o, Monet - if indeed he was motivated by photographs - reverted to what was already a rather archaic form. Corot's and Monet's perception of nature was not, strictly speaking, instantaneous, as Chesneau stated (the exact meaning of that word was somewhat ambiguous in the i86os and t87os), but more like halated images or photographic time exposures during which the definition of moving forms was partially or wholly obliterated. Monet himself, later, used the term `instantaneous' in a more deliquescent sense to describe the effect of changing light he despaired of catching `. . . I seek: "instantaneity ", especially the "enveloppe", the same light spreading everywhere . . .''e ( , )
1 1 .

t t 1. Monet: Poplars at Giverny. Senrim. 1 888

In other ways, too, innovations peculiar to Impressionist painting closely approximate to the characteristics of snapshot photographs. The apparently fortuitous distribution of figure- in their city-scapes, cut by the frame, are often found in those stereoscopic views produced in vast quantities from about c 86o. This feature, though occasionally discovered earlier in art, certainly had no precedents in the immediate tradition of nineteenth-century European painting before Impressionism and it was completely unknown to painters like Giuseppe Canella or to those many engravers who specialized in urban views (II2). Degas's use of such compositional devices, undoubtedly stimulated in large part by photographic prototypes, will be discussed in the following
112. Le Ponl-Seul. Engraving on dagucrrrotype plate published in Excnrsions Uaguerriennes, 1 842

above). Hippolyte jouvin: de, Victoires. 46o - t ,-, (stereoscopic photograph)

,

A(nghl). Gustave Caillebotte: G rcluge, boulevard Haussmann. i 88o

86o-65 (stereoscopic photograph) end t 14 ( detail). Hippolyte Jouvin: Le Pont-Neuf. t

76

chapter. The unusual viewpoints too, particularly elevated ones, typical of many Impressionist paintings, have far more in common with photography than they do with art. And here one can point to the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte, that avid, more than amateur patron of Impressionism who in his exuberance sometimes exceeded even the compositional innovations of Degas, from whom undoubtedly the initial stimulus came. Caillebotte's canvases like Un refuge, boulevard Haussmann (t 88o) may well be compared with the stereoscopic photographs, for example, of Hippolyte Jouvirl (115, 11(1). The viewpoint is rare even in of his very unusual Boulevard, vue d'en haut (117), also of 188o, photography where, to my knowledge, only a literary reference of the early 186os exists describing the startling bird's-eye photographs of pedestrian traffic taken by Count Aguado, well known in photographic circles. This is hardly to be seen again in photography until 1913 in Alvin Langdon Coburn's almost perpendicular views of New York and in the tg2os in those taken by Lszld Moholy-Nagy in Berlin. Even Nadar's now well-known balloon photographs of Paris in the late 185os and 186os are not exactly comparable because of the greater elevation from which they were made - though very likely they and others of the kind were of some importance in promoting this type of pictorial view of the modern urban complex (118). It might also be suggested that to some extent the idea of painting the sequential light and atmospheric effects on one immobile object, as in Monet's series of the Rouen Cathedral and Sisley's of the church at Moret, was in part :;7s
7
~_>srnIIitY , g=JU/Aei ~,

stimulated by photography. Certainly in art, in the popular visual entertainments especially, a number of ingenious means had been invented by which the temporal modulations of light could effectively be represented on a single picture surface. Daguerre's Diorama, first shown in 1821, was probably the most astounding of all such illusionistic techniques. With the advent of photography and a few judicious modifications, a degree of realism in the pictorial articulation of natural light was approached which was surpassed only later with the invention of cinematography. Firmly rooted in the tradition of the popular visual arts of the nineteenth century was an interest in cinematic representation, not only of the transitory nature of light but also - in the form, for example, of the phenakistiscope, the zoctrope and the many devices which sprang from them - in the animation of objects. In the 188os the possibility of modern cinematic projection was established and much excitement was generated by the experiments of its pioneers. Thus, in painting his series of haystacks, poplars and cathedrals, Monet not only acted in accordance with this tradition but he may also have reflected the great current preoccupation with cinematography, a sequential series of instantaneous i mages.s o
NATURAL COLOUR

wpitlt Pt7AAy A~*vlt

dYro~

~Pw1i dtanu d C..R~G44

The obvious advantages of colour appealed to artists who wished to be free of the competition from the monochromatic photograph. Many painters, however, did not much heed warnings of the kind published in the Spectator and persisted, out of a useless quixotism or spiritual inertia, in rendering their subjects in a more or less monochromatic photographic style, so roundly condemned, for example, by Chesneau in 1859. Yet, as efficacious as a heightened colour-consciousness may have seemed in the 18os and 185os, by the 1 86os the potency of naturalistic colour alone in painting may well have been doubted. For not only had it always been possible for photographers to paint over their images and from about 186o not infrequently over photographs printed on canvas, but the discovery of a natural colour process after mid century appeared inevitable. By the 1 85os reasonable successes in this technique at least indicated that such a process was not impossible. At the Paris exhibition of 1863 - the same in which the Salon des refuss was held - photographs in natural colour were on display, though they were not yet permanently fixed. Taken by Niepce de Saint-Victor, they were said to have excited much interest, though they could only be shown briefly at half-hour intervals. A contemporary report described their bright colours, especially a fine yellow ... the scarlet is also vivid. There are pinks, blues, greens, and some other tints. The general efict of the pictures is similar to that of an un-fixed Daguerreotype, the image being embedded in a kind of film.

117, Gustave Caillebotte: Boulevard, vue d'en haut. t 88o

ii8. Nadar: Aerial photograph taken from a balloon. 1 898

Some of the problems of printing and fixing natural colours in photography were soon overcome. There are photographs of that kind surviving to this day a montage of plant forms taken in 1869 by Louis Ducos du Hauron, for example, and his landscape view of Angoulme in 1875. On learning that du Hauron had published a work on colour photography in 1867, Charles Cros, a friend of Manet and, later, of Seurat, deposited a sealed envelope with the Acadmie des Sciences describing his own method, which subsequently proved to be practicable. But even earlier, in 1 861, James Clerk Maxwell had already demonstrated his colour process successfully: his photograph of a rosette ribbon is in the collection of the Kodak Museum, Harrow. Fixed colour photographs (`polychrome prints') by Vidal were on exhibition in the Palais de l'Industrie in 1874, the colours said to have a strong effect in the shadow areas. The advances made in colour-processing threatened to close the already narrow gap between naturalist painting and photography, at least in the estimation of those who did not see sufficient differences between them to guarantee a happy coexistence. As early as 1864 a writer in the Quarterly Review described the consequences if natural-colour photography ever became a reality. There can be little doubt, he warned, `that in such a case the camera would have undisputed possession of all actual scenes and existing objects, and the easel and canvas would be restricted exclusively to imaginative painting'. When that day arrives, he concluded, photography will have done `the good service of exterminating bad painters and of aiding good ones'. In the 187os photography in natural colours appeared menacing enough to provoke this comment from Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the well-known teacher of the memory method in art Truth in art is not photographic truth, as many people seem to think nowadays. Numbers of painters seem, under the influence of this idea, to be entering into a rivalry with the camera, as laborious as it is futile. I grant that in the direction of detail and illusion they have achieved results such as the great old masters neither dreamt of nor tried for. Yet to appreciate this triumph of the moderns at its proper value, let us suppose for a moment that photography were to succeed one day in reproducing and fixing colour. In that case where would the most detailed and most successful imitation be in comparison with pictures of nature that were similar to a reflection in a looking glass? While the works of great masters ... would not only not lose by comparison with the mechanical pictures of photography, but would appear all the finer. What makes real art would then be far better understood, and it would be admitted beyond question that art is not just nature, but is the interpretation of nature through human feeling and human genius. The Pcho de Paris in 1895 arranged an interview with Gauguin who, not without a consciousness of colour photography, asserted his right to use colour and form in an arbitrary way and to distort nature as had the artists of past centuries

Shall I tell you what will soon be the most faithful work of art? A photograph, when it can render colours, as it will soon be able to. And you would have an intelligent being sweat away for months to achieve this same illusion of reality as an ingenious little machine? Though it was not until the very first years of the present century that most of the problems inherent in the reproduction of natural-colour photographs were satisfactorily surmounted, they had frequently been almost solved during the preceding forty years. Just how sensitive the Impressionist painters were to the imminence of colour photography in those decades, or how alert they were to warnings like those sounded by Lecoq, is very difficult to know. Yet it is hard to believe that they could have been totally indifferent to such a momentous possibility. Inevitably, the untenable relation between naturalistic art and photography became clear. However much other factors may have contributed to the character of Impressionist painting, to photography must be accorded some special consideration. The awareness of the need for personal expression in art increased in proportion to the growth of photography and a photographic style in art. The evolution of Impressionist painting towards colours one ought to see, and the increased emphasis on matiire, can well be attributed to the encroachments of photography on naturalistic art. Impressionist paintings may be seen as mirrors of nature, but above all they convey the idea that they are paintings of nature. 61

8. Degas and the instantaneous image

INSTANTANEITY

just as photographers had always attempted to perfect a natural-colour process so they hoped to solve the problem of recording objects in motion. In the flush of enthusiasm which accompanied the first appearance of the photographic camera, the aspirations of the new photographers far exceeded their possibilities. The extravagant claims made were more significant for what they anticipated than for what could then be accomplished. Daguerre, as an example, announced in 1844 that he could photograph galloping horses and birds in flight, the technique for which was not effectively possible until the 1870s. The description, `instantaneous', applied to photographs was of course only a relative one. Writers in the early art and photographic journals were at pains to define its precise meaning. In fact, only later, from about 86o, when the camera could fix moving objects in positions which were inconceivable, when it froze them in attitudes completely foreign to the customary ways of seeing, could it correctly be said that photography had solved the first problem of instantaneity. Another, and very important, stage was reached in the 1 870s when photographs could be taken of even faster moving objects, i mmobilizing them in postures which not only defied convention, but which were actually beyond the capabilities of the unaided eye, however keen that eye might be. There were early experiments, some of them successful, in which objects moving at high velocity were arrested by the camera. In 1851 Talbot using the intense light of an electric spark was able to `stop' a rapidly revolving disc on which a copy of The Times was mounted so that the print could be read with case. But efforts of this sort were principally confined to the laboratory or were otherwise exceptional and for practical reasons could not be employed in the manner and on the scale feasible after the development of more highly sensitized plates and more efficient shutter systems. In 1858 exposures at 1/5oth of a second were possible; they marked the appearance of the `snapshot'. With the introduction of instantaneous photography, a vast number of city views, most of them taken with stereoscopic cameras, were offered for sale in what seemed to be an insatiable market (119, t2o). It was then that H. P. Robinson produced his photographs of the streets of
i 2o

(detail). Hippolyte jouvin: Boulevard de Strasbourg. Ma 6,5 (stereoscopic photograph)

1 82

Leamington which record the `passing objects of the day', and the London Stereoscopic Company, in 1861, those which show `omnibus horses with uplifted legs without a blur, and foot passengers in every stage of action perfectly defined'. The precision in detail of views of Paris also taken in 1861 was said to be absolutely marvellous Walking figures, running figures, falling figures, equestrian figures and vehicles, all caught in their acts without the slightest appearance of movement or imperfect definition. Here is a lad transfixed in the act of falling, flying forward, as something has tripped him up; he remains on the slide doomed neither to fall farther nor rise again. To the physiological sciences instantaneous photography was of great importance and, in one interesting case, of immediate usefulness. For in their revelations of the complicated mechanism of walking, such photographs helped to solve the difficult problems in effectively designing artificial limbs for the amputees victimized by the American Civil War. We have selected, [wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1863], a number of instantaneous stereoscopic views of the streets and public places of Paris and of New York, each of them showing numerous walking figures, among which some may be found in every stage of the complex act we are studying. And following an analysis of those movements, Holmes observed, as did many others in the following two decades, that `no artist would have dared to draw a walking figure in attitudes like some of these '52 (121).

DEGAS'S ' PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE'

It was therefore as daring as it was imaginative for Edgar Degas to translate the strange images of the instantaneous photograph - as undoubtedly he did - into an entirely modern means for depicting an urban society. For it is highly probable that the many compositional innovations and peculiarly natural poses which appear in his work have their source, not in traditional art, nor solely in Japanese prints, nor purely in his imagination but largely in photography. Far from being simply an imitator of the fortuitous images of the instantaneous camera, as has sometimes been suggested, Degas made them function as new pictorial conventions in the calculated accidents with which he pictured the contemporary scene. His artistic career almost exactly parallels the instantaneous period in the development of photography, and since most of its characteristics are intrinsic to the process it is highly unlikely that he could have influenced it. In his known letters, Degas was as suspiciously silent about photography as his Impressionist associates. There seems to be only one comment by the artist, a letter to the singer Di6 Faure in 1876, asking for photographs, in this case belonging to the famous choreographer, Mrante (122, 123, 124). Degas gives only a hint that he will use them for a picture. But the testimonies of some of his friends and acquaintances describe both his interest in, and use of, photographs. Other evidence, some of it indisputable, records the fact that occasionally he employed them directly.

1 2 t. Anon: Detail from i nstantaneous photograph. 1 86os(?)

Disderi: Series of caries-de-aisile showing Mrante, Coralli, Terraris and Louis Fiocre in the costumes of the ballet, Pierre dr Mdici.s. Probably 1 876
st2-.y.

Degas described his use of photographic material to Ernest Rouart, and Rouart's friend, Paul Val6ry ( who also knew the artist), wrote that Degas `loved and appreciated photography at a time when artists despised it or did not dare admit that they made use of it'. Valry quotes Rouart as saying that he had gone to the artist's studio where he was shown a canvas `which he had sketched out in pastel, in monochrome, after a photograph'. He was among the first artists, said Valry, 'to see what photography could teach the painter - and what the painter must be careful not to learn from it'. In a tribute to Degas soon after his death in 1917, the artist Jacques-mile Blanche noted the precocity of his old friend in having used the special characteristics of the instantaneous photograph His system of composition was new [declared Blanche] : Perhaps he will one day be reproached with having anticipated the cinema and the snapshot and of having, above all between 187o and 1885, come close to `the genre picture'. The instantaneous photograph with its unexpected cutting-off, its shocking differences in scale, has become so familiar to us that the easel-paintings of that period no longer astonish us . . . no one before Degas ever thought of doing them, no one since has put such ` gravity' . . . into the kind of composition which utilizes to advantage the accidents of the camera. Comments on Degas's `photographic eye' were frequent in the decade immediately following his death. His biographer, Lemoisne, for example, among other paintings compared the pose of the Danseuse sur une pointe (1875-6) with the arrested motion to be found in the instantaneous photograph. And singling out Le Foyer de la Danse of 1872 (in the Camondo Collection), Gustave Coquiot believed it had - and unfortunately so - many of the attributes of a photograph (125). Coquiot disliked the painting intensely and wrote disparagingly of it: All these dancers, in this huge empty room, make a composition that would serve very well for a photograph; nothing more. The picture is correct, frozen; it is well balanced; but a skilful photographer would easily have managed a similar arrangement. lie believed the Rptition d'un ballet of 1874 ( Camondo Collection) to be of the same kind Yes, truly, it is impossible, before a photographic reproduction of the second picture, not to imagine that one has before one's eyes an actual photograph.... Degas may have been a fine draughtsman, but he was not a painter. Julius Meier-Graefe, more appreciative of the artist's talent, described the second picture aptly. The dancers, he noted, look perhaps like `mobile puppets which have been photographed on a brown background'. But elaborating on the observation of the painter Max Liebermann, who earlier had said that `the first impression created by the pictures of Degas is that created by a snapshot', Meier-Graefe insisted that Degas `knows how to compose his picture in such a way that we do not notice it is composed at all'. Echoing Blanche's fears that the artist's reputation will decline as the photographic image becomes more commonplace, he carefully pointed out that `by the acuteness of his vision [Degas] has seized upon a point of view with which we have become familiar from photographs', but his `peculiar angle of vision' and his decentralized compositions, protested Meier-Graefe, come from Japanese art instead. If Coquiot could have seen that Degas went as far beyond photography as Rodin went beyond Madame Tussaud's waxworks, and Meier-Graefe had not thought it remiss to utilize those special features of the photograph, we might have got closer to the truth. But in the 1 g2os ` photography' was still a tainted word to many artists and critics and could, as they chose, be maliciously invoked or judiciously ignored. 63
DEGAS'S USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS

1 25. Degas: Le Foyer de la Danse. 1 872

Perhaps the earliest indication of Degas's use of a photograph can be found in one of his sketch-books deposited in the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris. It is a drawing of two women in crinolines dating probably about 186o or 1861 and inscribed `Disderi photog.'. A brush drawing of about 186o, a portrait of his

t 86

126. Degas: 'The Woman with the Chrysanthemums (Mme Hertel). 1865

younger brother Ren, appears to be `clearly copied after a photograph dated 1857', the same photograph possibly related also to one of the artist's etchings. The peculiar decentralized compositions used by the artist in La femme aux chrysanthmes (1865) (126) and Bouderie (1873-5) (127) and the odd angle of vision of the latter are quite distinct from normal pictorial convention. Placed at the edge of the picture space, the figures appear to communicate with something outside, enhancing the fortuitous character of the subjects and creating an implied space external to the paintings - `in the wings', so to speak. These are entirely germane to snapshot photographs of the time, or for that matter any time. Both paintings are said to be based on photographs though, in the case of the former, only for the portrait. Pierre Cabanne writes of these two pictures. `Some years ago in London the photos were found which he had used for the portrait of Mme Hertel : The Woman with the Chrysanthemums' and for the canvas entitled Bouderie (Sulkiness), 'lie posed Mme Arthur Fontaine and M. Poujaud himself; the photograph exists and shows us that Degas followed it exactly for the composition'. In a later photograph of this couple, taken by Degas, the poses are reminiscent of the Bouderie (128). In the case of Degas's small portrait of the Princess de Metternich (National Gallery, London) there is positive evidence of the use of a photograph. It is a carte-de-visite taken by Disderi in 86o: the Prince de Metternich, shown in the

1 87

127. Degas: Bouderie. 1 873-75

Photograph of Pan] Poujaud, Mme Arthur

ontaine and Degas, posed by the artist in 1894

t 2g. Disderi: Carte photograph of the Prince and Princess de Metternich. c. t 86o

t ao. Degas: Portrait of the Princes de Mellernich

1 31. Carte photograph of Degas taken probably 1862

1 32.

Degas: Sclt-parait,

Dega.realaonl.c. t 8b2

photograph, was suppressed in the painting (2g, 1 30). The artist, Suzanne Fisendieck, discovered it some years ago and John Rewald published the information suggesting, quite reasonably, that though the artist was not acquainted with the Princess, the photograph was used because he was attracted to her striking physiognomy. The marvellous subtleties to be found in the poses of such photographs, in the strangeness of the fixed expressions and in the delicate and unexpected tonal structures would undoubtedly have interested an artist of Degas's sensitivity. His self-portrait of about 1 862, Degas saluant, was probably executed from or based closely on a photograph. Among photographs of the artist known today there is a small carte-de-visite which is similar in several respects, but what is most revealing in the painting is that the usual mirror reversals common to selfportraits are absent. As in the photograph the hair is parted on the right and the waistcoat buttons left over right; the disposition is similar to that in Ingres's late painting of himself (131, 132). In the 1 8gos Degas owned a camera and took many pictures; in several he used his characteristic compositional and lighting techniques. He probably became interested in taking his own photographs in the mid t 88os through his acquaintance in Dieppe with a photographer named Barnes who worked for him and his friends. Degas sent some of Barnes's photographs to the young

Walter Sickert. At that time in Dieppe Degas may well have known the painter Fritz Thaulow, who was said to use the camera extensively in taking landscape views. Gurin suggested that some of Degas's late landscapes were executed from photographs, probably his own in the boxes in his studio were found enlargements of photographs of places in the environs of Saint-Valry [sur-Somme] which were certainly direct references photographed by him and used for his landscapes; some of these enlargements bear a striking relationship to the artist's landscapes of that period. Gurin also described other photographs found in Degas's studio after his death landscape views and a few of women ironing, taken presumably by himself or under his direction . .' 4
PROBLEMS OF PERSPECTIVE

In his book, Le secret professionel

(1922), Jean

Cocteau wrote

Photography is unreal, it alters tone and perspective.... Among our painters Degas was the victim of photography as the Futurists were the victims of cinematography. I know photographs by Degas which he enlarged himself and on which he worked directly in pastel, marvelling at the composition, the foreshortening, the distortion of the foreground forms.

[ go

Degas's singular attitude to one of the most firmly established and tenacious conventions in Western art, the system of rational perspective, may well be ascribed to photography. His frequent use of looming repoussoirs in the foregrounds of his pictures and the dwarfing of objects slightly farther in depth is sometimes said to have been inspired by Japanese prints. But the kind of perspective scale typical of a large number of his paintings and drawings springs, most likely in the first instance, from so-called aberrations of the photographic image. Abundant references were made in the nineteenth century to `distortions' of this kind. It was due to an excess of sphericity in the painter's eye wrote Louis de Geofroy in i 85o, in a criticism of one of Meissonier's paintings: `The pupil in his eye fulfils absolutely the role of the lens in the daguerreotype, enlarging for him out of all proportion the foreground objects.' Nadar ridiculed Charles Marschal's painting, Le frileux, shown in the 1859 Salon, for the same reason. His caricature of one of the subjects sitting on the ground describes a pair of Brobdingnagian feet looming in the foreground, the monstrous distortion attributed to a `faulty photograph' (133) - Sir William Newton warned artists of this `shortcoming' in the perspective of photographs as did Vernet, Ruskin, John Brett, Philippe Burty, Degas's friend Mix Bracquemond, Paul Huet and a number of others. There are several amusing accounts of this peculiarity. Writing in the Art journal, Francis Frith, a distinguished landscape photographer, observed that ladies of uncertain age and gentlemen with uncomfort1 33. Nadar: Satire on !.e Frileux, Charles \tarschal's painting exhibited in the Salon of 1859

%as: Portraits dans un bureau, Vouvelle Orlans. 1 873

ably large noses had `taken pains to spread abroad in the public mind an alarming theory about spherical aberration'. He placed the blame on the type of lens usually employed by portraitists, recommending instead thse used for landscape. This feature often present in photographs of interior views is particularly Robert Tait's noticeable in Degas's Cotton Bureau of 1873 (134). Similarly,

But Watts's `modern error' was a modern truth. Delacroix knew this and, as he noted, the camera faithfully reproduced such deformations in nature, literally true but artistically grotesque. Joseph Pennell provides a clear and pertinent description of this characteristic in photographs. For a series of drawings of English cathedrals he had at first used photographs of these buildings enlarged on drawing paper over which he worked in ink, the residue

Chelsea painting of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in their drawing-room, called A demonstrates the same extremes in perspective scale. Jane Carlyle had Interior, Tait had not this painting when she wrote, `I wish good cause to complain of
painted Nero [the Carlyle hound in the lower right foreground] as big as a sheep! That is what provokes me; more than being transmitted to Posterity in
t q5. Robert Tait: A Chelsea Interior. Exhibited R.A. 1858

of the photograph being bleached out later. When, however, on visiting one of the actual sites Pennell saw how much the photographs had distorted the perspective, he destroyed the drawings already made, determined to execute the series
entirely on the spot. `When I measured the front of the cathedral as given in the photographic enlargement,' he explained, `and compared this with the more distant portions on the enlargement, the photograph was worthless, the distance being absurdly reduced by photographic perspective.' Pennell then suggested that the photograph showed what in fact existed. But, like Delacroix, he believed that for the sake of artistic expression liberties had to be taken with what was actually there Now, I do not mean to say decidedly that this photographic view is incorrect. It is quite possible that it is literally correct. But artistically it is absurd. At any rate, if it is correct, it destroys all feeling of size, impressiveness, and dignity. He then described the work of other artists, associating their use of perspective with the camera image That this perspective may be correct, as I say, is possible since architecturally trained draughtsmen who have not drawn from nature to any extent render objects with photographic perspective. So, too, did some of the old Dutchmen. There was a notable example of this in the last exhibition of Old Masters at the Academy, in Ver Meer's Soldier and Laughing Girl. But I think it extremely likely that Ver Meer used the camera lucida, if it was invented in his time, for it gives the same photographic scale to objects (136). Questioning the objectivity of a system of perspective in use since the Renaissance, Arthur Parsey, a specialist in that field, explained in The Science of Vision (published in 1836, before the discovery of photography was announced) that if artists painted and drew in correct perspective the unusual appearance of their works would be condemned by the public. And in a second edition of his book, published in 184o after the arrival of photography, Parsey was vindicated. The photographs of Talbot and Daguerre and their `natural images', he exclaimed, had proved that his earlier observations were right. In 1892, after a half century of debate on the causes of these photographic aberrations, a useful experiment was performed in which three photographs

wrong perspective and with a frightful table cover!' (135). This `wrong perspective' was called by George Frederic Watts `the modern error'. Photography, he protested, has unfortunately introduced into art a misconception of perspective which is as ugly as it is false. It is false in so far that it presents a foreground which makes it possible for the spectator to see the whole of the principal figure without moving his eye, and at such a distance the eye must be so far removed from the subject that sharp perspective becomes an impossibility.

were taken of the same landscape subject using three different types of lens. One was made with a lens of only a 6 angle of vision, another with that used in ordinary tourist cameras of 25 and the third with a wide-angle lens of 73 . The resulting perspective was different in each case (137). The variations thus produced in the perspective scales depend on the viewpoint necessitated by the angle of vision in each lens. The farther removed the lens from any measurable foreground object, the less steep the perspective between it and more distant forms; the closer, the more exaggerated will be the scale. Cinema directors have long exploited the expressive possibilities of the wide-angled lens. Carl Dreyer used it in Vampyre (1931), Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1940) and it was extraordinarily effective in David Lean's Great Expectations ( 1945). The relevance of the wide-angled lens in films like Gulliver's Travels is obvious. Quite possibly Degas was entirely aware of this photographic peculiarity and of its consonance with his ideas about pictorial form, not only late in life - as Cocteau relates - but from the time it first appears in his work. It is unlikely, I believe, that it crept in simply as a result of the `innocence' of his eye. Indeed, among his written notes of about 1868 to the early t 88os he suggests representing things from close-up, `as one sees them passing by on the street'. Other comments in the notebooks, no less precocious and modern, make it unthinkable that he could have ignored the equally startling images of instantaneous photographs. Like several of his other compositional innovations, this exaggerated perspective offered the potential of creating a new spatial scale with a temporal undertone entirely consistent with the accelerated growth of Paris from the i85os into a busy and crowded metropolis. The determination with which other artists repudiated such images reiterates the point, so clearly shown in the similar resistance to certain postures revealed by the instantaneous camera, that under pressure even artists committed to optical truth will fall back on convention. Thus, by the power of its convincing images, photography served, in these and in other respects, to undermine any ideas of an immutable perception of nature. Ernst Gombrich has laid the stress not on convention but on the operation of built-in constancies which cover `the totality of those stabilizing tendencies that prevent us from getting giddy in a world of fluctuating appearances'. In other words, the rejection of sharp perspective is not just a sign of obedience to established concepts of form, but to psychological imperatives which demand that things be seen in certain fixed relationships. According to Gombrich, the greatness of the discovery of Renaissance perspective was not that it conformed to optical truth but that it embodied something more fundamental: the need to 55 see the world that way.

Soldier and Laughing Girl. r. 1657 1 37 (right). Strcintz: Photographs demonstrating differences in perspective scale according to lens and viewpoint. 1899

JAPANESE PRINTS

The association between Degas's compositions and those of Japanese artists was made at least as early as 188o when Huysmans described the way figures in the paintings were cut off by the frame, `as in some Japanese prints'. There are indeed many examples of this feature in such prints, particularly in those of the nineteenth century, though it was by no means common in all styles and periods. Quite as many examples could be cited in which cutting-off and the decentralization of composition was avoided. But in the popular ukiyo-e woodcuts by Hokusai, and especially in those of Hiroshige, that technique was employed. In the case of the latter artist, for his Hundred Views of Yedo (1858-g), it is found in a most exaggerated and unconventional manner. And there is reason to believe that these last works of Hiroshige may themselves owe something to photography (138). Often, as in Hokusai's fourteen-volume Mangwa, cutting-off occurs more by accident than design, and certain compositions and subjects of large size spanned two facing pages which, if viewed singly, would appear in that fragmented form. As these prints became popular in Europe it is likely that many illustrated books were taken apart and disposed of as separate prints. Other compositional devices employed by the Japanese, like looming foreground forms and steep perspective scales, occur but not, it seems, as frequently as they occur in photographs. However, as far as the looming figures themselves are concerned, Utamaro's many prints of women seen in half-length and Sharaku's portraits of actors and especially certain compositions of Hokusai and Hiroshige may well have served as models. But before a more precise assessment can be made of their influence, more will have to be known of the exact dates such prints reached the artists in Europe, and how they were interpreted after they arrived. Though a small number of Japanese prints made their way to the West long before the Impressionists were on the scene, the first reference to their connection with them seems to be a somewhat vague story about Bracquemond's acquisition of one of the Mangwa volumes about 1857 from a wood-engraver in Paris named Lavielle. The history of that volume in the following five or ten years, however, is rather obscure. Edward Strange records `very few landscapes by Hiroshige' from The Hundred Views of Yedo in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Collection, acquired in Paris about 1 862 or 1863, probably at the Porte Chinoise of Mme Desoyes which first opened in 1862. He does not describe them. Popular colour prints by contemporary Japanese artists were displayed in the 1862 International Exhibition in London. In the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867 such prints were shown in the Japanese Pavilion. They included the work of Hiroshige's favourite pupil, Shigenobu (Hiroshige II). Lemoisne claims that Degas himself owned a number of Hiroshige prints, though the dates of acquisition are not given. The list of

133. Hiroshige: The Ilaneda Ferry and 13en(en Shrine. 1 858.

From One 1fundred Vieirs of 1'edo

examples, of course, grows as the high period in japonisme is approached in the 18 0 , But what should be said here is that rather than being mutually exclusive 7 s influences on Degas, photography and these woodblock prints were mutually reinforcing ones. The propitious conjunction in the early i86os of both Japanese prints and instantaneous photographs must for Degas have been of fundamental i mportance. Appropriately, Edmond de Goncourt in his book Outamaro (18gi) compared the fortuitous qualities of the poses and gestures in the work of the oukiyo yd artists with similar forms to be found in photographs."
CUTTING-OFF AND CINEMATIC PROGRESSION

Dcgas: Place de la Concorde (Vicomte Ludonic L.epic and his Daughters). c. 1 875

On the other hand, not only were the typical forms of instantaneous photographs to be found earlier in photography, but in the astronomical number of instantaneous views (mostly anonymous) published from about 1860 these peculiarities very frequently occur (139). An excellent album in the collection of Andr Jammes, for example, contains 197 stereoscopic photographs called Vues instantanies de Paris. Taken probably between 1 861 and 1865, these were put on sale by the photographer Hippolyte Jouvin. The cutting-off of figures,
1 39. Instantaneous photograph of the Borough High Street, London, taken in 1887 under the direction of Charles Spurgeon Jun.

t ot and 142 (detail). Hippolyte jouvin: Boulevard des Capucines. t 86o-65 (stereoscopic photograph) 1 43 (opposite). Degas: Carriage at the Races. 1873

horses and carriages can be found very often throughout the series. Here are several views of the Pont-Neuf from exactly the high viewpoints as in some Impressionist paintings of the same subject. In the photographs of the boulevard de Strasbourg, in those of the boulevard des Capucines and the place de la Concorde, and in many others the inevitable dissevered pedestrians occur. In some of them, horses and carriages are cut off in much the same way as is Degas's vehicle in his pictures of a Carriage at the Races ( 1 4 1 , 142, 143). Indeed, it seems that one of these pictures `was derived from a photograph'. Mocking the photographs of Disderi, the caricaturist Cham, in Le Charivari, December 1861, appears to demonstrate his awareness of these forms - and this immediately preceding their appearance in the work of Degas. One of his drawings is of a standing omnibus, the back end alone visible, the remainder cut off not just laterally, but also at the bottom where no more than one third of the wheel shows. Furthermore, anticipating a device which appears later in Degas's work, the lower legs only of the passengers riding on top are visible, the upper portions of the bodies cut by the frame. Though compositions of this kind are not unknown in magazine illustration of the i 850s it is still a new convention and Cham's cartoon seems a deliberate comment on the ridiculous forms found in snapshot photographs ( 1 44). There is no cutting-off in Degas's earliest pictures of racecourse scenes. Probably he first uses it in his jockeys d Epsom of 1862 in which the head of one horse is neatly, and perhaps navely, severed where it joins the neck. From 1862 it becomes a constant feature in his work, particularly when the subjects

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1 46. Degas: Dancer Tyiap her Slipper. 1883(?). (l.(moisne's date c. 1 893-

98)

1 44. Cham: Detail from page of caricatures and satire on Disderi. Le Charivari. December 186 1

145. Degas: Dancer in sequential poses. n.d. (Lemoisne's date 1899)

are horses or dancers. In pictures like the well-known Place de la Concorde (c. 1 875), for example, it is used with great skill (140)The way in which Degas presented a kind of cinematic progression, particularly in his compositions of dancers, had seldom before been tried in painting. The juxtaposition of like subjects, and in some cases the same subject, to simulate the appearance of a single, animated figure recorded in more or less consecutive phases of its movement even antedates the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. And in a later work (after Muybridge) like the so-called Dancer Tying her Slipper (1883?) (146) Degas represents, literally, one figure, not in sequential positions but in the same one, or two, as it would be seen from different viewpoints - as one would see it by reading a Muybridge plate vertically instead of horizontally (147). It may be worth noting that Muybridge himself sometimes organized his photographs in this way. An earlier parallel, however, can be drawn between Degas's kinetic compositions and other contemporary photographs. Disderi, for exampie, in the early 186os, had taken many carte-de-visite series of ballet-dancers and other subjects, and a group of his photographs arranged more or less sequentially are not unlike Degas's pictures and could have contributed to their inspiration. As early as 186o cameras were in operation which could be used to take several successive poses of the same subject on a single plate. Disderi's cartes were often produced in this more economical way, the plate then processed and the prints either left intact or, more usually, cut into separate images. Several examples of uncut cartes-de-visite have survived, most of them by Disderi (148). In 1862 he described his ` Chssis

1 4). Muybridgv: F'enmle, !feting a toad, rcipmg here// ... Consecutive scricv photographs from Animal Locomotion. Published 1 88]

1 48. Disderi: Mardca Muravieva i n dancing costume, 86q.. Uncut sheet ofcarles-de- visite

204

multiplicateurs', a camera with four lenses which could be adapted to produce eight images on the same plate. Before long similar cameras were devised which contained up to fifteen and more lenses. Though these, more likely, were copying cameras used to multiply, simultaneously, a single image, they (like Disderi's camera) could easily have been modified to take a series of different poses. The idea of organizing sequential images to make moving pictures was certainly in the air about t86o. In the early 183os devices like the phenakistiscope, the stroboscope and the zotrope had been invented. By means of these instruments, drawings or lithographs, utilizing the phenomenon of the persistence of vision, could be made to impart to the subjects the appearance of movement. After the coming of photography it was only a question of time for photographs to replace the drawings in these early moving-picture viewing machines, and about 1851 the new stereoscopic photographs were so used in a contraption called the ` bioscope' which reappeared in a modified form in i 86o. In 1861 Dumont took out patents in France for a photographic camera

claimed to be capable of recording rapidly successive phases of movement. In 1864. du Hauron patented a similar device. But the idea of producing consecutive photographic images for their own sake, without intending to animate them, occurred at least as early as 1862 when a novel technique was contrived to take a set of photographs in a `progressive series' while a lady was delivering a lecture. e7
DEGAS'S HORSES

In two of Degas's pastels on monotypes, Scne de ballet and Le pas battu, both dated about 1879, the dancers are shown caught in mid-air with their legs completely offthe ground (149). Their execution at this time, exactly coincident with the arrival and publication in Paris of the unprecedented instantaneous photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, is probably more than fortuitous. The first, and perhaps the only ones, of their kind to be found in Degas's known work, it is not unlikely that they reflect the intense interest of artists and critics in the extra-instantaneity of the Muybridge photographs (150).

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1 49 (far left). Degas: Le pas battu. c. 1 879 (pastel on monotype)

-'7 1,50 (left) Muybridgc: Consecutive series photographs showing phases of movement in a horse's trot and gallop. 1 877_ 78. Published in La Nature. 1 4 December 1 878